download

ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE 455
greater elaboration, especially in the direction oflinear pattern^
making, and this tendency continues and grows throughout
the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The example of
Ripon is a peculiarly marked one, as Archbishop Roger of
York, who began the rebuilding of the church, had only a few
years earlier carried out works at his own metropolitan church
in York in a most sumptuous and ornamental Anglo-Norman
Romanesque manner. Equally, though the restrained elegance
of the Cistercian fashion ultimately prevailed in this region, it
was not unchallenged, and the evidences of the remains of
sculpture from St. Mary's abbey at York show all and more
than all of that richness of representational decoration against
which St. Bernard and St. Ailred had both inveighed.
In planning, the early and middle years ofthe twelfth century
show a very important development which was to influence
the whole character of English church architecture in sub/
sequent centuries. This was the gradual abandonment of the
apsidal-ended plan, whether the three/apsed or the apse and
ambulatory plan, in favour of a rectangular
treatment of the
eastern
parts
ofthe church. There are three main variations of
this: the simple rectangular presbytery projecting one or two
bays beyond the aisle ends; the treatment whereby both aisles
and the main vessel are carried out and finished offsquare to the
east in a great
flat eastern fagade; and a third system in which
the aisles are returned at right angles round the east end of the
main vessel, forming an ambulatory, sometimes double the
width ofthe aisles themselves, so as to accommodate chapels on
the eastern side. No completely satisfactory explanation ofthis
development away from the apsidal treatment has yet been
found. At Chertsey, at Southwell, and in the reconstruction of
the cathedral of Old Sarum in the 1120'$, rectangular eastern
arrangements were adopted before any question of Cisterican
influence could arise, but it seems unquestionable
that the
influence of the early Cistercian church, which implies a rect"
angular treatment of the presbytery, often even simpler than
any of the types already described aisles
(the of Cistercian
churches were often not carried farther east than the transepts),